At the last brief graveside service there was only the family: Nell, Leon and Sarah, Penelope, Selma, Rachel, Lovey and Stella. Felix’s last will and testament had given Stella her freedom and a thousand dollars. Since his death she had stayed with Lovey and Clarice in the little house they shared. Clarice’s daughter Ricey had married five years ago, to her mother’s exasperated relief, the tinker-blacksmith of Oaks and gone there to live. Leon offered Stella a home forever or for as long as she pleased to stay at Beulah Land, but she was still only in her forties, and healthy and adventurous besides, and so she elected to go and live in Savannah, Penelope giving her copious references to friends and acquaintances, should she decide to seek work as a nurse.

The earth will fill holes made in it; air merges with air and flows on, missing nothing and no one that has been subtracted from the landscape. But after Felix died and was buried, there remained and continued in people’s memory thoughts of the man. In Leon’s life particularly Felix’s death left a space not filled by earth or air, a space that would always remain vacant and make him a little lonely. Felix, although uncle to him, was part of his youth and manhood. If Floyd had been and was his “good” friend, then Felix and Bonard had been his “bad” friends—perhaps even more necessary than the former because they understood and shared his weaknesses.

In the real sense they had both been lost to him since Bonard went off with Lauretta and Felix suffered the first stroke of paralysis on the occasion of the burning of the warehouses nearly fifteen years ago. But whereas their special function as “bad” friends had not for some time been exercised, they had been alive; and now they were dead, both of them.

Last October Sarah had received a letter from Lauretta who then was living in San Francisco. In part Lauretta had written: